Rick Geiger presented Session BSAIoT-2100 – How to Successfully Converge IT and OT (Operational Technologies) at Cisco live in San Francisco this week, with strong interest from attendees.

Many of you know of Rick Geiger from this blog and other publications. Rick’s session at Cisco Live 2014 discussed the many aspects and challenges of merging OT and IT in organizations. Computing and networking for operations requires more IT-based support and a growing convergence of IT and OT skill sets to support intelligent devices and varied processes. Rick’s session discussed the convergence driven by the critical needs of the OT organization for the process maturity of IT and for managing and securing the growing complexity of OT systems.

In bringing IT processes & capabilities to OT, IT will need to recognize the needs of critical control systems and the equivalent process capabilities that OT provides for engineering and operations. Successful companies will find ways to establish common ground & combine the expertise & value of both. Bringing standalone devices or isolated networks into core operational systems will bring clear and tangible advantages and business benefits to those companies.

Rick’s session topic covered new ideas & concepts that are developing around IT/OT, providing major opportunities for those who understand how to leverage their IT know-how to Operations.

This is an exciting time in the history of datacenter infrastructure. We are witnessing the collision of two major trends: the maturation of open source software and the redefinition of infrastructure policy.
The trend towards open source is self-evident. Platforms such as OpenStack and OpenDaylight are gaining huge developer mindshare as well as support and investment from major vendors. Even some newer technologies like Docker, which employs linux kernel containers, and Ceph, a software-based storage solution, offer promising paths in open source. Given the fundamental requirements of interoperability in architecturally diverse infrastructure environments, its no surprise that open source is gaining momentum.

The second trend around policy is a bit earlier in its evolution but equally disruptive. Today, there is a huge disconnect between how application developers think about their requirements and the languages and tools through which they are communicated to the infrastructure itself. For example, just to handle networking, a simple three tier app must be deconstructed into an array of VLANs, ACLs, and routes spread across a number of devices. Storage and compute present similar challenges as well. To simplify this interaction and create more scalable systems, we need to actually rethink how resources are requested and distributed between different components. This really boils down to shifting the abstraction model away from configuring individual devices to focus on separately capturing user intent, operational, infrastructure, and compliance requirements.

At Cisco, we’ve really embraced both of these trends. We are active contributors to over 100 open source projects and were founding members of OpenStack Neutron and OpenDaylight. We’ve also made open source a successful business practice by incorporating and integrating popular projects with our products. In parallel, Cisco has accumulated a lot of experience in describing policy through the work we’ve done with Cisco Unified Computing (UCS) and most recently with Cisco Application-Centric Infrastructure (ACI).

Building on this foundation, we see a unique opportunity to collaborate with the open source community to deliver a vision for policy-driven infrastructure. This will enhance the usability, scale, and interoperability of open source software and benefit the entire infrastructure ecosystem.

This vision includes two initiatives in the open source community:

Group-Based Policy: An information model designed to express applications’ resource requirements from the network through a hardware-independent, declarative language and leave a simple control and dataplane in place. This approach replaces traditional networking constructs like VLANs with new primitives such as “groups”, which model tiers or components of an application, and “contracts” describing relationships between them. Group-Based Policy will be available in the context of OpenStack Neutron as well as OpenDaylight through a plug in model that can support any software or hardware infrastructure.

OpFlex: A distributed framework of intelligent agents within each networking device designed to resolve policies. These agents would translate an abstract, hardware-independent policy taken from a logically central repository into device-specific features and capabilities.

As technology becomes smarter and capable of more connections and interactions, we will begin to see certain trends arise in the mobility industry. Trends such as, low-cost mobile devices will positively impact developing regions around the world, Internet of Things (IoT) partnerships will drive transformation of mobile networks and the proliferation of wearables will further increase the number of connected devices.

These trends and more are shaping the future of mobility, and what they mean for executives in today’s business landscape. In addition, the convergence of mobile, cloud and infrastructure is demanding that executives prepare for what will certainly be an evolutionary time in our history.

So looking ahead over the next twelve months, what mobility trends have immediate business implications for organizations and service providers?

The programming of network resources is not just a trend, but also a way to future-proof IT and business needs.

This blog series examines how infrastructure programmability is providing a faster time to competitive advantage and highlights the differences between programmable infrastructure and traditional infrastructure, and what programmability means for your entire IT infrastructure.

To read the first post in this series that defines infrastructure programmability, click here. To read the third post in this series that discusses how IT leaders can embrace this change, click here.

By the end of this year, the number of mobile connected devices will exceed the number of people on earth, and U.S. businesses alone will spend more than $13 billion on cloud computing and managed hosting services. In addition, the growing convergence of mobile, cloud and the network is demanding that organizations implement the right combination of strategies, processes, and infrastructure.

As the industry is changing faster than we can imagine, we are shaping the future with a new model for IT. Today’s infrastructure must be simple, smart, and secure.

A piecemeal approach to leveraging new technology—in the midst of a fast-paced market—could leave businesses disaggregated and left on the sidelines by faster competitors.

Unleash Fast IT, an operating model that delivers simplification and orchestration through automated, agile, and programmable infrastructures. The concept of Fast IT embodies IT being agile enough to operate at the speed of business. This means that in order for your organization to be successful in an increasingly complex world you must have an infrastructure that runs at a speed and scale never before seen.

There are three core principles for Fast IT: simplicity, intelligence and security. In some ways, this model is markedly different from the current IT model, which can be highly complex and closed.

Guess what? Convergence is happening again, and it’s happening at a faster pace with more profound implications than I have never seen before.

Those of us who’ve been in the industry a long time have seen convergence happen over the years across various technologies and areas of IT. This time, we’re talking about convergence across the infrastructure—in wired and wireless, in physical and virtual, in collaboration and social, and in on-prem and off-prem resources. Convergence brings together the applications and infrastructure in new and more flexible ways, opening up new opportunities.

Getting this convergence right is a big deal. And it’s a key to becoming an innovative enterprise. It’s clear that if you’re not innovating, you’re going to miss out on opportunities to be strategically valuable to your organization.

This convergence is called different things by different people and firms. IDC calls it “third platform” while Gartner talks about ‘Nexus of Forces.’ In any case, they’re all talking about technologies, such as cloud, mobility, data and network programmability, which are blurring and blending. And in addition, the combination of these technologies is collectively making the Internet of Everything possible.

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